And it so happens that Sonnenberg, now Moxie’s artistic chief, served as production stage manager on that initial 1995 staging of “Crumbs” at Second Stage Theatre.

Both she and the playwright have come a long way since then. Sonnenberg, Glover and several others eventually founded the women-centered Moxie, which has grown into one of San Diego’s most esteemed midsized theaters.

Nottage broke through to wider success in 2003 with “Intimate Apparel.” In 2009, “Ruined,” her searing play about horrors and hope in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

DID YOU KNOW?

Sonnenberg, who is directing “Crumbs” for her company, recalls the original production warmly as “my first understanding of people doing theater because they loved theater.”

She also perceives a through line from that early Nottage effort to such later plays as “Ruined” (staged at La Jolla Playhouse in late 2009) and “Intimate Apparel,” which Sonnenberg directed for San Diego Rep in 2006.

“I think all of her work has a sense of poetry, has a sense of politics,” Sonnenberg says. “I like the way she’s able to combine history and politics and social (issues) into a story.

“It’s the experience as seen through the characters, rather than the playwright lecturing. That’s beautiful. And this play is particularly poetic.”

The 1950s-set piece tells the story of two teenage girls (played by Jada Temple and Deja Fields, both students at the San Diego School for the Creative and Performing Arts) who have recently lost their mother.

Now their dad (Vimel Sephus, seen recently at Ion and Cygnet theaters) has gotten both religion and a new wife (played by Moxie co-founder and associate artistic director Jennifer Eve Thorn), and moved the family to New York. There, the girls’ radicalized aunt (Cashae Monya, a standout of last year’s Moxie/Mo`olelo production of “The Bluest Eye”) drops in and causes complications.

Amid the first signs of broader social changes, the girls must navigate their new reality.

The play, in short, is “about growing up,” says Sonnenberg. “And trying to understand the world on your own terms.”